Using Shakespeare to combat maths anxiety

Maths anxiety is the feeling of being overwhelmed and confused when faced with a maths problem. Studies have suggested that it affects between 6 and 17 per cent of the population.

“Kids come in loving maths and think it’s cool to count numbers, but by the time they get to high school, many have decided they can’t do it – it’s too hard,” Marcia says. 

The drama graduate and former actor from Canada started teaching maths at Bowraville Central School on Gumbaynggirr country on the NSW mid-north coast in 2019. 

“I think the regional mentorship scholarship that Teachers Mutual Bank does with Bell Shakespeare is fantastic as it does tap into schools with big needs.” 

Big ideas and storytelling  

Some of the techniques she picked up as a working actor proved handy in the classroom, but she was also actively scouting for new ways to engage students – and bring inspiring theatre performances to town.

This led her to the Bell Shakespeare company and its fully funded year-long Regional Teacher Mentorship program, sponsored by Teachers Mutual Bank. She was accepted into the 2021 intake, which included a four-day workshop in Sydney and 12 months follow-up support, and she has been applying the techniques she learned ever since. 

Marcia says that many of the techniques she learned in the workshop were similar to her theatre training. 

“We learned about how to link big ideas, make complex plots and narratives simple, and find pathways through that for any subject with dense content,” she says. “We thought about finding ways to help students see the bigger picture and where they are in a current plot point – and where that fits in the overall storyline.”

Working on storytelling techniques to best engage the school’s large cohort of First Nations students was particularly relevant.  

Getting physical with trigonometry

Equally important was Bell Shakespeare’s focus on the need to get students up on their feet to be both physically and mentally engaged.  

“Obviously these theatre techniques lend themselves to some lessons better than others,” she says. “It’s not like a 24-7 every single math class we’re up and outside in the yard running around acting crazy. 

“But it’s a fantastic thing to be able to use when engagement drops, like at the end of the week, or if we’re looking at a particularly tricky topic that they don't know enough about.”

She cites teaching trigonometry as a good example.  

“Learning trigonometry can be very procedural for students. It can be very much a checklist. And you can teach it that way. And you can teach it with a flow chart, for example.  

“What I did immediately after coming back from Bell Shakespeare was to look at it and see how I could physicalise this, and how we could interrogate the questions and answers a little bit more.”

This included students physically acting out triangles, angles and ratios as individuals and then groups in a similar manner to the group activities used at Bell Shakespeare. 

 “And then I have them really interrogate and look at the questions to see what they need to ‘ask’ of the question to decide which steps to take to solve it. Once the student is positioned as the asker of questions, they can start to relax and think deeply to make connections with what they already know. 

 “Once students understand a question, having physicalised the flow chart helps them remember the path through to the solution.” 

Sharing Shakespeare 

While it’s early days, Marcia says she believes her students are more engaged and “have a better handle” on this important STEM subject.  

She’s also delighted that one of her young colleagues is following her lead and has been awarded one of Bell Shakespeare’s 30 Teacher Mentorships for 2023. 

“I think the regional mentorship scholarship that Teachers Mutual Bank does with Bell Shakespeare is fantastic as it does tap into big needs in our schools.”